


BETA TROLLS: ASCEND

by Mamcine_Oxfeather



Series: i n t e r . m i s s i o n [s] [1]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: AU, Alternate Ending, Alternate Universe - Alternate Game Ending, M/M, Other, all quadrants all ships all the time tbh, space navy academy, spacenavy
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-11-03
Updated: 2017-11-05
Packaged: 2019-01-28 17:26:37
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,335
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12611652
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mamcine_Oxfeather/pseuds/Mamcine_Oxfeather
Summary: "Ascend" details the flashbacks that were originally written throughout "E.T." - following the Beta Trolls down a timeline where everything in SGRUB went only as right as to save them from The Scratch, a victory which doomed them to a return to normalcy; neither rulers of a new universe nor loser pupas culled by circumstance.  Gratuitous use of NPC/OC, xenobiology, and space-navy drama.





	1. AJ1017: NAV UNMP; [set.cor]

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kindlyclears](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kindlyclears/gifts).



Warning lights flashed red and green through the crippled duster ship, klaxxon wailing down halls into rounded operation blocks, piercing the air and doubling off the bare hull in the post-explosion silence. Karkat Vantas labored under his burden, fragrant gold blood smeared down the front of his Midshipman uniform, Sollux Captor propped over his shoulder limp and silent. Karkat’s breath stuttered in the beginning heaves of a sob, fingers nerveless against the keypad of the transportalizer.

The room they landed in had lost its debris shield, wide thick window lit from the churning orange and amber jewel of the exploded star, the force of which had been diverted from the smaller ship’s hulls by great sacrifice.

“Look what you did,” Karkat accused, jostling his shoulder. “We didn’t fucking ask you to do that. Open your fucking eyes and LOOK.”

Behind the smear of burning hydrogen, an orbiting resource belt had been scattered, sent sprawling through space from the overexertion of the psiionic shield thrown up against the unexpected collapse of the nearby star. “You’re in deep shit, Captor,” Karkat’s voice wavered, red tears gathering in the corners of his squint. “All that scalite gone now; shoulda just let us die.”

“Did you stop him?” First Officer Serket barked from the overhead comm. “Vantas, dammit, what’s the sitch? We don’t have any reads on Captor’s bio. Please tell me that’s because someone finally stabbed him.”

Karkat’s blood went cold, fingers crushing around Sollux’s bony wrist, fearing the only pulse he could find was that beating panicked through his own fingertips. The pain of his grip stirred Sollux to wake, who then bit down hard enough to pierce the fabric of Karkat’s uniform.

Wavering in place under the assault, Karkat rasped through his grunt of surprised pain, “He, uh. He’s here. It’s done. We’re fine.”

“Biometer fritzthed under the thionic prethure.” Sollux mumbled against blood-wet wool. “Get me to medical, fuckthtub, my head ith killing me.”

Vriska snorted. “They’re looking for you in medical, nooksplosion. You’re going to be shot on sight, for mutiny.”

Sollux tightened his grip around Karkat’s stout support, moaning quietly in pain. “For thaving everyone’th liveth? Navigator Beliat can thuck my ath.”

“We already woke Makara,” Pyrope yawned from the ether of open comms. “So you could say it’s a coin toss, depending on who reaches you first. Him or douchelorde acting-Captain Halbat.”

Karkat knuckled his communicator to Makara’s frequency, and hissed their location. He then gingerly set Sollux back to his own feet, gagging silently as one ruined eyeball rolled down the front of his uniform. Karkat drew his scythes, grip weak and breath thready through a chest tight with sour panic.

“Gardening tools?” Halbat scorned from the transportalizer, lean and tall and purring. “Why don’t we step away from the traitor and keep ourselves from getting hurt,” she crooned, gills working gently from behind the high collar of her uniform, blue-painted nails flashing green in the yellow light of the destruction before them as she drew her double-bladed stave from its specibus. “Captor, your orders were to preserve the flagship and resource belt, but you instead chose to sacrifice your usefulness to this fleet by shielding a handful of lowlife expendables? Do you have any excuses to make for yourself before I take your empty head off?”

“What iif,” Sollux rasped from his lean against the warming window. “I told you, uhh, ehehe. I thaved your Royal Commander’th moirail, becauthe I know what kind of meth we would all be in if fuckthtub over here were to bite the dutht?”

Halbat sneered over her pierced lip, unimpressed. “If you’re suggesting Makara actually _needs_ this squawling grubrunt -”

“DON’T YOU FUCKING PUT THIS ON GAMZEE. OR ME,” Karkat blurted, twitching in his tense defensive crouch. “Asshole! We all know you were just saving your girlfriend, fucking AGAIN!”

“Whoa now, Megido can take care of herthelf.” Sollux paused, then snickered sharply. “Gaille, put down your weapon before your oh-tho-emothionally-thtable Commander theethe that thit raithed at hith palemate.”

Halbat blanched, “ _Pail_ mate, or -” but the wordplay didn’t matter, because the punchline was something entirely too blunt exploding through Officer Halbat’s chest, the juggling baton force-punching blue viscera across the gold-smeared tile.

Karkat gagged audibly and retched a splatter of dinner to a steaming pile between his boots, whole-heartedly rejecting the bloody-handed shoosh-pap Gamzee had stepped over Halbat’s twitching corpse to deliver between his horns.

“Easy, brother,” Makara soothed, deep violet eyes half-lidded with sopor drowse, persons dry of everything but fresh trollblood. “Deep motherfuckin’ breaths. What’s got all this commotion up in my aural sponge about mutiny and unhappiness on this Good Ship Jolly- _drop_?”

“Had to thave the back half of the hopper fleet from that unthtable dwarf Dorian warned about, but the forthe-puth meant the thythtem-wide dethtruction of our flagthip, and a thevere loth of rethourthe mining. I mean, the thip’th fine, jutht kinda crippled in the wet-workth. Everybody’th thafe.”

Gamzee let out a soft honk of approval, smoothing both blue-wet hands over Karkat’s head and cheeks, despite the struggle and gagging and slapping.

“Motherfuckin’ A, Solbro, but what’s a guy in charge gotta do to make sure he don’t square up like a nepotistic chump, all favorin’ his pupahood friendships over the profit margins of the motherfuckin’ Empire ‘n shit? I mean I owe a brother his life, giving me back what the jaws of that hungry star almost had swallowed, but we can’t come out of this all alive together if punishments ain’t made, all good and public.”

Karkat halted his fussing.

Sollux dropped to a knee, the slow curl of pain overtaking his stability. “Fine, fuck, whatever, but can we dithcuth thith AFTER I VITHIT MEDICAL??”

There was a pause. Gamzee honked softly, a single syllable of a laugh. “I don’t think motherfuckin’ traitors who put lowbros in difficult positions get to get their medicated on, do they?”

“No,” First Officer Serket answered from the overhead, a cackle edging her voice. “You’re right. They don’t.”

And following Karkat’s groan (muffled by Gamzee’s uniform, against which he was currently being squeezed), Judicant Pyrope chimed in. “I have an idea.”

Which was how Karkat found himself hung upside down in the brig, shackles cutting into his ankles to let his shameful blood paint down the grim white prison jumpsuit, a public display to illustrate what happens to lowbloods who tempt gold-blooded Navigators into the troll disease called friendship. This, more constructively, acted as an open letter to anyone who assumed Commander Makara was in any way a stable individual sans moirail, as not two days passed of resumed mining operation that the twenty-strong higher fleet officials were hurrying through the paperwork to see Vantas freed.  That the Subjugglators operated within the confines of their own brotherhood mattered not - a religion was only that, a set of beliefs acting astride any other formal directive of absolutely heinous amounts of strictnasty leadership, yo.

(Thus, since that was what-all those motherfuckers wanted to see all descended on K-bro’s upended self, that was what-all those motherfucks were gonna get served for their own. Because equality ‘n shit. HoNk.)  

When Advocate Vantas was lowered to aching limbs and the throb of a blood-flooded skull, he was in no gracious mood to accept the rough damp lave of Commander Makara’s tongue across his stinging ankles, hissing and shoving as much at the claw-rake of embarrassment against his insides as at the big doofy head of his lanky, regal moirail.

“Don’t be gettin’ your motherfuckin’ hate on at a bro,” Gamzee had plead, bundling over Karkat right there on the floor despite the discomfited witnesses (or, more cleverly, because there were witnesses). “You know the chain of command had to make the motherfuckin’ decision for they motherfuckin’ selves, best friend. Coulda been Captor all up ons this wall, but a crew wants to get its blame on at the little guy, hOnK.”

“Don’t call me little,” Karkat had rasped, adding an extra sheen of sweat to the onlookers as he bonked Gamzee on the back of the head. “Keep your fucking Faygo-suck mouth off me, I swear to GOG I will make Captor turn this entire fleet AROUND -”

Gamzee, despite the expectation of his onlookers to clamp his maw on one end of the lowblood and rip the other end free like the top of a cardboard breakfast box, honked a series of quiet laughs and apologies, settling his snuggle-drowse prone in Vantas’s lap under each foreboding threat and numb-fisted slap across his back, until Karkat ran out of steam and the only sound was the snore of an exhausted highblood -

who startled awake with a hOnK under the burst of tirade Karkat let loose at the small crowd of weary onlookers, fucking daring any single member of the FUCKSUCK PEANUT GALLERY to even rumor one more HONKING THING, EVER AGAIN, about shit that was so clearly NONE OF THEIR GRUBFISTING BUSINESS.


	2. << RWND

* * *

 

The pods measured five trolls wide and five deep, a tiered wall of inset sopor holes stretching down the ship’s cavernous berth, wide and black and yawning, a many-toothed deep sea (deep space) maw. Sleeping passengers had already been stowed from the distant continent, crammed together like fish in a food cylinder, five heads per hole, twenty more bodies sunk beneath, those with unwieldy horns stuck to the tops. When Karkat was shoved to an empty pod he chanced to tug Tavros alongside, wheeled chair clattering under the drone march, scattered to broken parts. Already, a rainbow smear of blood and prone bodies had stacked against the corridor corners and to the side of pathways, trampled or culled dissenters, the lamed or the stunted or the unpopular.

Tavros’s horns clattered against the blunt lip of the pod to stop his bobbing descent, sopor slime sluicing over and down to escape the thick black gangway grating, slime from the level above drooling down on them as the pods filled. Everything was dim and green and loud with panicked bickering from what heads were not yet breathing slime, and Karkat curled his grip under the wide sturdy span of Tavros’s rack to keep buoyant, keep his lungs clear and his mind awake. More Ascensions were led from the hot dark night into the neon green glow of the freezing cold transport belly, shoved down and under panicked limbs into cool wet slumber, stacked and disappeared in the overcrowded grip of their vast passenger crater.

Elbows hooked around knees, noses turned against ankles, horns bled thighs and Karkat held on, trembling, scowling at Tavros’s excited grimace, scowling at the snug catch of the embrace around his waist keeping him upright while desperately grasping strangers lost their slimed grips on Tavros' fortunate horns and were stacked under. “Don’t let go,” Karkat warned again, close to a plea. He needed to stay buoyant, awake, to haul Tavros around once they were off-planet. He needed to stay awake to keep his friend alive.

“I wonder what courses, Vriska signed up for,” Tavros answered over the din of the loading panic, fangs bared now in a full grin. “She hasn’t decided, on an MOS, uhh yet.”

Karkat winced as two more bodies were shoved into the pod and up against them; Tavros’ thin, deadened legs wrapped now between his own, and Karkat felt the drag of a submerging troll's grasp tug his loose drawstring sweats down with them.  "FUCK."  Karkat kicked down at the slackening grip, knee curling up awkwardly to try and rescue Tavros' pants with the hook of his foot.  "Ground Control to Spacecase Lovepuke; I'm not carting your fat ass around without any trousers to cover it.  Hold my shirt." Karkat took a deep breath and let his weight bob out of Tavros' slackened grip.  Hand by hand, Karkat braced either side of the oblong pod to shuffle himself below the heavy sucking sopor - pushing a face away and down to grab up the hem of the lost sweatpants.  In fits and kicks, Karkat resurfaced to cinch the pants tightly around Tavros' waist and wrench a double knot in the drawstring.

“Easy, uh, buddy.” Tavros snickered, arms under Karkat’s shoulders, stronger by the years of his handicap. “Your eyes are so, bugging out, right now. Heh.”

“Fuck,” Karkat articulated, jaw shivering.

“It’s gonna be awesome,” Tavros asserted confidently. “We are going to kick, so much ass, KK.”

“Shut the FUCK up, PB. We? Are going to fUcKiNg DIE, ok,” Karkat babbled. “If we don’t get snuggle-raped in this terrorship first.” His grip tightens on Tavros’s horns, full-body trembling, overwhelmed by all the noise and stink. “Fuuuuck, I should have just run. Lived dirtside forever. FUCK.”

“I like, how your voice cracks, like Gamzee sometimes? Reminds me, uh, that we’re going to see him soon.”

“Fuck that crazy assclown,” Karkat spat, the heat of his moirailligient heartbreak pitching black. “He’s probably moved on from us. Didn’t answer my gogdamn emails. Could be DEAD, and would I even know? No, fuck that guy.”

“He’s busy being uh, you know, someone that can’t be settled down, in the moment? He needs to stay competitive.”

"He NEEDS my FOOT up his SHIT-HOLE."

Tavros pulled a face, but forewent any argument. "We're not gonna die. We're going to, uhh, be the opposite of lame dead losers, remember?"

"I don't trust it," Karkat confessed, grunting as the last of their pod was sandwiched in, cramming his shoulderblades against the rounded lip of the pool. He readjusted his grip on Tavros' hornbeds, kicking down through the slime at some turd-gurgler groping up his knee. "What SGRUB promised. We're not IN the Game anymore, how the shit-blistering FUCK can it impose our powers?"

Tavros shrugged, laugh muted by the background din of terrified young Ascensions. "Same as, I guess? Same as we could do things in the Game as we already did in the real world?"

"That doesn't make any sense." Karkat's shivering had waned under the distraction of their argument, and the rows of above-slime passenger heads groaned and fell silent in unison as the ship lurched in a sudden revving engine pull, loading doors chugging slowly shut.

Tavros' awkwardly fanged grin softened, eyes dark with the start of their bronze iris reveals. "Magic doesn't have to make sense, KK."

Karkat grumbled, dipping his chin to blow sopor bubbles at the floating lapel of Tavros' dark green overshirt, a puff of laughter landing warm against his wet hair.

* * *

Karkat's drifting thoughts woke slowly to a gentle ebbing, and for a sleep-gummy moment he was back in Terezi's hammock with a warm night breeze answering their comfortable veteran silence.  Nearly aspirating sopor, Karkat's eyes snapped open and his grip seized tight to Tavros' shoulders, confused for a moment which was rocking, the whole ship or just that pod.  Karkat peered past Tavros' slack-slumber face to watch the edge of the sopor lap against their pod walls, then hauled himself a little further up by those ridiculous wide horns to squint at the other pools, still and sleeping, sopor calm in the loose gravity of space.

"Hey," Karkat whispered, patting Tavros' cheek to rouse him, pushing distance between their bodies to check below their feet if anyone was fighting for their personal space - jerking back in horror as a blossom of color whorled up through the sopor glow, unmistakably bronze.  "Hey wake up, man.  I think you've been stabbed," Karkat rasped.  "Someone's horns, your leg or-"

Tavros mumbled, then stiffened, arms returned to their squeeze around Karkat's waist as his eyes peeled open one after the other.

Karkat braced himself away, kicking down at sleeping heads, a scared hiss lacing through the base of his lungs as slime clung to his thrashing grope.  "If you've been  _bitten_ I swear to  _Gog_ -"

"Karkat," Tavros croaked, pale, clasping Karkat's wrists to still his desperate grope.  "I, uh, think it's my stomach." 

Their hands moved carefully through the ply of the warmed sopor, the body heat of the packed trolls rolling steam through the ship dark.

"I can't find a wound," Karkat groused under breath, looping his arms behind to search down Tavros' flanks.  "MOVE, ASSHOLE," his shout rang down the berth, rousing sleepers and prompting cat-calls; Karkat shoved at the body he'd discovered tucked way too close against his friend, obstructing the inspection.

"KK," Tavros plead against Karkat's ear, fallen still in confusion and alarm, "Feels like, uhh, an inside thing?  Maybe my ulcer ruptured when we crossed the gravity line?"

"OR MAYBE THIS SNUGGLEFUCK NOOK-WHIFF TRIED TO GET HIS _PRONG IN_ ," but Karkat's mouth snapped shut against the insult, a vulgar suggestion he'd only thrown out to attend the shoving match but -

But Tavros threw an elbow back with a 'whoa, what' and the bigger rustblood behind him countered with a kinetic pressure that turned muscle strength watery and made Karkat's ears ring.  Weak and deaf as if he'd been plunged fathoms deep, Karkat watched Tavros mouth his name, watched his eyes widen in alarm as his backward flail under the slime found the arms tugging his hips back.  Brown and maroon billowed up through the sopor and Karkat let his horrified rage rip from his guts through his nose until he could once again hear himself through the pressurized tinnitus, arms thrown over PB's shoulders to try and sink claws into whatever piece of face he reached first, stymied by the psychic shield pushing back, attack scrabbling off like he was trying to claw down the smooth lip of the pod and not remove the eyes of a rapist.

"It... it's fine,"  Tavros warbled, shaking hand papping the side of Karkat's arm.  "Hey, it's uh.  It's okay.  I don't feel it."  Tavros swallowed hard and pressed Karkat back against the pod corner to still his thrashing.  His soothe traveled from arm to the side of Karkat's straining neck, though Karkat only turned redder, screamed louder, sloshed the sopor to a froth with his slap-attack thrown relentlessly over Tavros' shoulders.  "Shoosh," Tavros insisted, chest hitching.  "C'mon, KK, don't."  The cheek-papping firmed, smoothed down tear-wet cheeks.  "Just, uh.  Leave it.  P-pick your battles, remember?"

Their corner of the berth had been stirred to complaint by the commotion, but the stationary drones made no move to intervene, and soon Tavros' adept soothing bundled Karkat's arms between them and quieted the feverish ranting threats to sobbing oaths.

They wouldn't speak about the pity that ran flush-red between them, in that moment, Karkat for PB's entire pathetic, vulnerable existence and Tavros for KK's constant, scalding emotional distress.  "Gnuh," Karkat protested again, arms curling up behind Tavros' neck to keep him from drifting back toward the terrifying uncertainty of their three above-slime podmates, all awake and bickering again for space.  Their cheeks mooshed together in the ferocity of that embrace, KK's growl hitching against the rumbling chirr of PB's uncertain redrom trek away from pale.

Karkat unclenched his face to glare down the disgusting fuck so he'd know who to push in front of the drones, but a sudden heat knocked up through his ribcage to squeeze his bloodbiscuit when a tealblood, dark and sharp and pretty under a tall set of horns, caught his eye over the two squabbling for repose.  The tealblood lifted his chin, drew a thumb across his neck, then nodded, and Karkat's nose wrinkled in confusion, anger, alarm - who was he threatening, exactly? - But Karkat nodded, eyes flicking from tealblood to rustblood, to the third whose blood glowed a little more chartreuse, then back to teal, whose lips curled up in a glossy black smile, white greasepaint lingering under his jaw and near the base of his ears where it hadn't been sweated or slimed off.

And while Karkat could still feel that bone-deep pity he'd lowkey always harbored for PB, he sure as fuck felt  _something more_ for this stranger, something instant and warm and fierce, a connection unique to trolls in sudden distressing proximity with aggressive strangers, a biological trigger for survival, a want disguising itself as a need.

* * *

 


End file.
